Ben Mezrich has 11 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 8 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 140 ratings. The most-rated is Bitcoin Billionaires.
Bitcoin Billionaires
Summary
"Narrating with subtle pitch and phrasing variations, Will Damron connects with every bit of the drama and interpersonal tension that pervade this story. His pleasing voice and facility with dialogue are enormously enjoyable.... Damron's superb performance adds to the excitement and makes this captivating listening." (AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner) From Ben Mezrich, the New York Times best-selling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House, comes Bitcoin Billionaires - the fascinating story of brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss' big bet on cryptocurrency and its dazzling pay-off. Ben Mezrich's 2009 best seller, The Accidental Billionaires, is the definitive account of Facebook's founding and the basis for the Academy Award-winning film The Social Network. Two of the story's iconic characters are Harvard students Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss: identical twins, Olympic rowers, and foils to Mark Zuckerberg. Bitcoin Billionaires is the story of the brothers’ redemption and revenge in the wake of their epic legal battle with Facebook. Planning to start careers as venture capitalists, the brothers quickly discover that no one will take their money after their fight with Zuckerberg. While nursing their wounds in Ibiza, they accidentally run into an eccentric character who tells them about a brand-new idea: cryptocurrency. Immersing themselves in what is then an obscure and sometimes sinister world, they begin to realize “crypto” is, in their own words, "either the next big thing or total bulls--t." There’s nothing left to do but make a bet. From the Silk Road to the halls of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bitcoin Billionaires will take us on a wild and surprising ride while illuminating a tantalizing economic future. On November 26, 2017, the Winklevoss brothers became the first bitcoin billionaires. Here’s the story of how they got there - as only Ben Mezrich could tell it.
©2019 Ben Mezrich (P)2019 Macmillan Audio
The Accidental Billionaires
Summary
The high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook. Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends, outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women. Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance, and sexual success, was getting invited to join one of the university's Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order. And he used his genius to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university's computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus and subsequently crashing the university's servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born. What followed - a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers - makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost, and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.
©2009 Ben Mezrich (P)2009 Random House
Once upon a Time in Russia
Summary
The best-selling author of Bringing Down the House (63 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and the basis for the hit movie 21) and The Accidental Billionaires (the basis for the Academy Award-winning film The Social Network) delivers an epic drama of wealth, rivalry, and betrayal among megawealthy Russian oligarchs - and its international repercussions. Once Upon a Time in Russia is the untold true story of the larger-than-life billionaire oligarchs who surfed the waves of privatization to reap riches after the fall of the Soviet regime: "Godfather of the Kremlin" Boris Berezovsky, a former mathematician whose first entrepreneurial venture was running an automobile reselling business, and Roman Abramovich, his dashing young protégé, who built a multibillion-dollar empire of oil and aluminum. Locked in a complex, uniquely Russian partnership, Berezovsky and Abramovich battled their way through the "Wild East" of Russia, with Berezovsky acting as the younger man's krysha - his roof, his protector. Written with the heart-stopping pacing of a thriller - but even more compelling because it is true - this story of amassing obscene wealth and power depicts a rarefied world seldom seen up close. Under Berezovsky's krysha, Abramovich built one of Russia's largest oil companies from the ground up and in exchange made cash deliveries - including $491 million in just one year. But their relationship frayed when Berezovsky attacked President Vladimir Putin in the media - and had to flee to the UK. Abramovich continued to prosper. Dead bodies trailed Berezovsky's footsteps, and threats followed him to London, where an associate of his died painfully and famously of Polonium poisoning. Then Berezovsky himself was later found dead, declared a suicide.
©2015 Mezco, Inc. (P)2015 Simon & Schuster
Straight Flush
Summary
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House - the sources for the films The Social Network and 21 - comes the larger-than-life true tale of a group of American college buddies who brilliantly built a billion-dollar online poker colossus based out of the hedonistic paradise of Costa Rica. One problem: the U.S. Department of Justice was gunning for them.... Based on extensive insider interviews and participation, acclaimed author Ben Mezrich's Straight Flush tells the captivating rags-to-riches tale of a group of University of Montana frat brothers who turned a weekly poker game in the basement of a local dive bar into AbsolutePoker.com, one of the largest online companies in the world, on par with some of the behemoths of the Internet. At its height, Absolute Poker was an online empire earning more than a million dollars a day, following savvy business strategy and even better luck. Its founders set up their operations in the exotic jungle paradise of Costa Rica, embracing an outrageous lifestyle of girls, parties, and money. Meanwhile, the gray area of U.S. and international law in which the company operated was becoming a lot more risky, and soon the U.S. Department of Justice had placed a bull's-eye on Absolute Poker. Should they fold - or double down and ride their hot hand? Straight Flush is an exclusive, never-before-seen look behind the headlines of one of the wildest business stories of the past decade.
©2013 Ben Mezrich (P)2013 HarperCollins Publishers
21
Summary
In the midst of the Go-Go '90s, the culture of greed infused the MIT campus. A small blackjack club sprang up, dedicated to counting cards and beating the house at major casinos around the country. The Club grew slowly at first, but by the late 1990s, the right people had come up with the right system to take some of the world's most sophisticated casinos for all they were worth. In less than two years, this ring of card savants earned more than $3 million from corporate Vegas. This is the true story of how they did it.
Bringing Down the House is everyman's dream, certainly every gambler's dream, and gambling is a growth industry on the East and West Coasts.
A cross between Liar's Poker, Ocean's Eleven, and The Cuckoo's Egg, this fast-paced caper features the most unlikely of heroes, a bunch of super-smart MIT geeks. Before the dot.coms kidnapped the mathematical geniuses of MIT, here's what higher education produced from the dark underbelly of the Ivy League, where kids with brains, money, and bright futures were just as likely to be found gambling in a Paradise Island casino as putting in time in the library.
©2002 Ben Mezrich (P)2008 Simon and Schuster, Inc.
The 37th Parallel
Summary
This real-life The X-Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind tells the true story of a computer programmer who tracks paranormal events along a 3,000-mile stretch through the heart of America and is drawn deeper and deeper into a vast conspiracy. Like Agent Mulder of The X-Files, computer programmer and sheriff's deputy Zukowski is obsessed with tracking down UFO reports in Colorado. He takes the family with him on weekend trips to look for evidence of aliens. But this innocent hobby takes on a sinister urgency when Zukowski learns of mutilated livestock and sees the bodies of dead horses and cattle - whose exsanguination is inexplicable by any known human or animal means. Along an expanse of land stretching across the southern borders of Utah, Colorado, and Kansas, Zukowski discovers multiple bizarre incidences of mutilations and suddenly realizes that they cluster around the 37th parallel, or "UFO Highway". So begins an extraordinary and fascinating journey from El Paso and Rush, Colorado, to a mysterious space studies company and MUFON; from Roswell and Area 51 to the Pentagon and beyond; to underground secret military caverns and Indian sacred sites; beneath strange, unexplained lights in the sky; and into corporations that obstruct and try to take over investigations. Inspiring and terrifying, this true story will keep you up at night, staring at the sky and wondering if we really are alone and what could happen next.
©2016 Ben Mezrich (P)2016 Simon & Schuster
Rigged
Summary
From the author who brought you the massive New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House, this is the startling rags-to-riches story of an Italian-American kid from the streets of Brooklyn who claws his way into the wild, frenetic world of the oil exchange. After conquering the hallowed halls of Harvard Business School, he enters the testosterone-laced warrens of the Merc Exchange, the asylumlike oil exchange located in lower Manhattan. A place where billions of dollars trade hands every week, the Merc is like a casino on crack, where former garbagemen become millionaires overnight and where fistfights break out on the trading floor. This ordinary kid has traded Brooklyn for the gold-lined hotel palaces of Dubai. He keeps company on the decks of private yachts in Monte Carlo, teeming with half-naked girls flown in by Saudi sheiks, and makes deals in the dangerous back alleys of Beijing. But the Merc is just a starting place. Taken under the wing of another young gun and partnering with a mysterious young Muslim, the kid embarks on a dangerous adventure to revolutionize the oil trading industry: and, along with it, the world. Rigged is the explicit, exclusive, true story behind the headlines that dominate the world stage.
©2007 Ben Mezrich (P)2007 HarperCollins Publishers
Sex on the Moon
Summary
Thad Roberts, a fellow in a prestigious NASA program had an idea - a romantic, albeit crazy, idea. He wanted to give his girlfriend the moon. Literally. Thad convinced his girlfriend and another female accomplice, both NASA interns, to break into an impregnable laboratory at NASA - past security checkpoints, an electronically locked door with cipher security codes, and camera-lined hallways - and help him steal the most precious objects in the world: the moon rocks. But what does one do with an item so valuable that it’s illegal even to own? And was Thad Roberts - undeniably gifted, picked for one of the most competitive scientific posts imaginable, a possible astronaut - really what he seemed? Mezrich has pored over thousands of pages of court records, FBI transcripts, and NASA documents and has interviewed most of the participants in the crime to reconstruct this Ocean’s Eleven-style heist, a madcap story of genius, love, and duplicity that reads like a Hollywood thrill ride.
©2011 Ben Mezrich (P)2011 Random House Audio
Ugly Americans
Summary
Ugly Americans is the true story of John Malcolm, a Princeton graduate who traveled halfway around the world in search of the American dream and pulled off a trade that could be described as the biggest deal in the history of the financial markets. Without speaking a word of Japanese, with barely a penny in his pocket, Malcolm was thrown into the bizarre life of an ex-pat trader. Surrounded by characters ripped right out of a Hollywood thriller, he quickly learned how to survive in a cutthroat world, at the feet of the biggest players the markets have ever known. Malcolm was first an assistant trading huge positions for Nick Leeson, the rogue trader who brought down Barings Bank, the oldest in England. He was the right-hand man to an enigmatic and brilliant hedge-fund cowboy, Dean Carney, and grew into one of the biggest derivatives traders in all of Asia. Along the way, Malcolm fell in love with the daughter of a Yakuza gangster, built a vast fortune out of thin air, and came head to head with violent Japanese mobsters. Malcolm and his twentysomething, Ivy League-schooled colleagues rode the crashing waves of the Asian markets during the mid-to late 1990s, culminating in a single deal the likes of which had never been seen before, or since. A real-life mixture of Liar's Poker and Wall Street, brimming with intense action, romance, underground sex, vivid locales, and exotic characters, Ugly Americans is the untold, true story that will rock the financial community and redefine an era.
©2004 Ben Mezrich (P)2004 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Woolly
Summary
Science fiction becomes reality in this Jurassic Park-like story of the genetic resurrection of an extinct species - the woolly mammoth - by the best-selling author of The Accidental Billionaires and The 37th Parallel. "With his knack for turning narrative nonfiction into stories worthy of the best thriller fiction" (Omnivoracious), Ben Mezrich takes us on an exhilarating true adventure story from the icy terrain of Siberia to the cutting-edge genetic labs of Harvard University. A group of young scientists, under the guidance of Dr. George Church, the most brilliant geneticist of our time, works to make fantasy reality by sequencing the DNA of a frozen woolly mammoth harvested from above the Arctic Circle and splicing elements of that sequence into the DNA of a modern elephant. Will they be able to turn the hybrid cells into a functional embryo and bring the extinct creatures to life in our modern world? Along with Church and his team of Harvard scientists, a world-famous conservationist and a genius Russian scientist plan to turn a tract of the Siberian tundra into Pleistocene Park, populating the permafrost with ancient herbivores as a hedge against an environmental ticking time bomb. More than a story of genetics, this is a thriller illuminating the race against global warming, the incredible power of modern technology, the brave fossil hunters who battle polar bears and extreme weather conditions, and the ethical quandary of cloning extinct animals. Can we right the wrongs of our ancestors who hunted the woolly mammoth to extinction - and at what cost?
©2017 Ben Mezrich (P)2017 Simon & Schuster Audio
Seven Wonders
Summary
When the reclusive mathematician Jeremy Grady goes missing, it's up to his estranged brother Jack to find out why. His search leads him on a far-flung journey - from Brazil, India, Peru, and beyond - as he unravels the mystery that links the Seven Wonders of the World, and discovers that Jeremy may have hit upon something that's been concealed for centuries. With the help of scientist Sloane Costa, they discover a conspiracy to hide a road map to the Garden of Eden - and the truth behind a mythological ancient culture. With a heart-pounding pace and panoramic backdrops, Seven Wonders is an electrifying listen, and will be the first in a trilogy.
©2014 Ben Mezrich (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.